AMLO’s latest attempt at a New Mexico

The landslide victory of Morena, the political party of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), in Mexico’s federal elections in June has breathed new life into his plan for a sweeping overhaul of Mexico’s political system.

The president originally proposed a 20-point set of constitutional amendments in February, but the package stalled in the legislature and was never put to a vote.

Once the new Mexican Congress is sworn in on September 1, López Obrador can count on a supermajority in the Chamber of Deputies and a Senate faction that is just two votes short of a supermajority to support his initiative.

Inspired by the election results, lawmakers from Morena and her allies have begun pushing the proposed constitutional amendments through the Constitutional Affairs Commission in the Chamber of Deputies. Several have already been approved, and the entire package, now consolidated to 18 proposals, is expected to be ready in time for legislative approval in September. The attempted approval of the constitutional reforms will be López Obrador’s last major initiative, as his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, also elected in June, is set to be sworn in in early October, leaving the outgoing president with just one month to get his proposal through Congress.

López Obrador’s proposed reforms span a broad spectrum of political issues. He plans to overhaul Mexico’s welfare system before he leaves office, and several of the proposed amendments are designed to strengthen social security and other forms of public assistance. These include reversing cost-cutting changes to pension and social security programs enacted in the 1990s, making permanent a job training and apprenticeship program for Mexican young adults, and enshrining in the constitution a number of welfare provisions that are currently public law, including the disability pension system, rural economic assistance programs and educational scholarships for impoverished students. The president also proposes to establish a new system of universal free health care for the country, the details of which would be worked out by the legislature in the future.

Another set of reforms focuses on changes in government employment. This includes a substantial increase in an inflation-indexed minimum wage for public sector workers in a number of key occupations, including education and medical care. Other amendments cover a hodgepodge of the president’s other priorities, including anti-corruption measures, animal welfare and environmental protection.

The most controversial part of the reform package, however, is a sweeping overhaul of Mexico’s electoral and political system.

The first amendment in this part of the reform would halve the amount of federal electoral funding given to parties for political campaigns and reconfigure the Mexican legislature, reducing the number of deputies in the Chamber of Deputies from 500 to 300 and halving the number of senators from 128 to 64. The amendment would also abolish the current two-tier system of elections, in which a portion of both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate are elected by proportional representation. Instead, all deputies in single-seat constituencies would be elected by majority vote, a method that is more favorable to the majority party than proportional representation.

Another amendment would overhaul Mexico’s judiciary. Under this arrangement, judges (including justices of the Supreme Court of Mexico), who are currently appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, would instead be elected by popular vote.

The third part of López Obrador’s political reform is the abolition of independent agencies, including the National Electoral Institute (INE), the agency responsible for the supervision and administration of elections, and the Federal Institute for Access to Public Information and Data Protection. The responsibilities of these agencies would be transferred to existing departments of the executive branch under the supervision of the president, with their budgets greatly reduced or eliminated.

Finally, López Obrador has proposed integrating the Mexican National Guard into the armed forces, giving the president broad powers to use them unilaterally to maintain public order and security.

This is actually the president’s third attempt to reform the INE, which he claims is corrupt and dominated by political opponents who undermine the integrity of Mexican elections. His first attempt was a constitutional reform in 2022, which failed to pass Congress. His second attempt, a law he successfully pushed through the legislature and signed into law in February 2023, was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court last year on the grounds that it was passed through a “corrupt defect in the legislative procedure.”

The outcome of these reforms would likely create a system favorable to Morena’s continued dominance of Mexican politics under Sheinbaum. If AMLO successfully pushes through the amendments during his final month in office, she could be inaugurated as president of a completely new Mexico.

A political system institutionally dominated by Morena would not be new to Mexico. For nearly a century, the country was governed exclusively by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), an arrangement that brought stability to the country after a long period of civil war, but was accompanied by massive corruption. This corruption allowed the flourishing of the Mexican cartels, which used the revenues from the emerging drug trade to influence local politicians and regional party leaders.

Corruption in Mexico, though much reduced, is still an endemic problem, and AMLO has attempted to address it with his Republican program of austerity. Nevertheless, the new reform package risks reintroducing old incentives and opportunities that cartels can exploit. The U.S. should pay close attention to the results of the constitutional reforms if it wants to maintain a relationship with a Mexican government capable of curbing drug trafficking across the southern border.